Chinatown

Blade Runner is a detective picture before it is science fiction, and the detective picture it is modelled on is the 1970s revision of noir that Chinatown defined. The shared frame: an investigator hired for a narrow job who uncovers a crime built into the city itself, a powerful old man who owns the infrastructure and cannot be touched, a woman who is the old man's creation and the investigator's failure, and an ending in which nothing is put right. Deckard's interrogation of Rachael is Gittes questioning Evelyn: the man asking for the truth is the one who does not understand what he is doing to her. Filed MEDIUM: an inheritance from a genre Polanski's film had just reinvented, rather than a debt Scott has stated.

Chinatown made the history of Los Angeles itself the subject of a detective story, and L.A. Confidential is the clearest inheritor: a crime that turns out to be a symptom of how the city was actually built and who took the profit. What both refuse is the clean public settlement. Chinatown ends with the man behind everything untouched and the detective made complicit by failing. L.A. Confidential does destroy its villain, and that is the difference worth stating: Dudley Smith is exposed and shot. What survives is the official version, in which he is buried as a hero and the department's reputation is protected. In both films the city's account of itself at the end is a lie.

Diaz Canales and Guarnido are working from the American noir that Chinatown revived rather than from the 1940s originals, and the tell is the period: Blacksad is set in a 1950s America reconstructed with the same slightly over-saturated nostalgia the 1970s neo-noirs used. The plots follow too. A private investigator is hired for a narrow job, and the case opens onto institutional corruption he cannot touch, with an ending that resolves the mystery and fixes nothing. Filed MEDIUM: an inheritance from a revival rather than a cited source.

Gore Verbinski built Rango's plot on Chinatown: in a desert town running out of water, a newcomer uncovers a scheme by the mayor, an old tortoise modelled on John Huston's Noah Cross, to control the water and profit from the land.